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Materials > Readings > Remembrance > The Song of Roland |
From the Introduction to The Song of Roland
[NOTE: French literature, it has been said, began with The Song of Roland, an epic poem written in the twelfth century recreating the historic battle of Rencesvals (778 A.D.). Roland, Charlemagne's greatest knight, is in command of the rear guard of the Franks' withdrawing army as it picks its way through a mountain pass. When the Saracens attack, Roland realizes he's been betrayed by his father-in-law, but he does not sound his olifant (a horn) for help, believing that he and his men should fight it out. The Franks are massively outnumbered, however, and gradually Roland's 20,000 men are slaughtered, leaving Roland alone on the battlefield. In his grief and defiance, Roland sounds his olifant until his temples burst and he dies. In the poem, this story of betrayal, defeat, and futile death is transfigured into an idealization of chivalry and valor.]
[In] one respect we today can identify ourselves with those who heard this poem in the beginning, because we take up a similar position regarding the time in which the action is set. We corroborate its retrospective point of view, we complete its context: with every performance, or with every reading, the presence of the audience establishes the pastness of the action. The audience therefore plays an indispensable role in the creation of the epic world: it calls that world forth by looking back upon it....
Once we view the epic world from a true perspective, that of an audience witnessing the reenactment of an unalterable past, we see a world governed only by providential force. Within that world, however, considered only in his nature, the epic hero moves in his own present with undiminished freedom of the will: "I would be a fool to sound the olifant," says he; or "I shall strike a thousand seven hundred blows." The unpredictable present and immutable past thus wonderfully coincide in an epic poem."
It is the past, or rather the audience's sense of the past, that ennobles these figures and their deeds, as it determines the form and technique of the poem. Because of the double perspective from which we, the audience, view the action -- we see it looking back from our present, and looking forward from the hero's present -- we experience at once in every figure and event the two forces of a free human will and a transcendental historic purpose. This is obviously true of an epic poem like The Song of Roland, in which this purpose is revealed as divine Providence: in Charlemagne's dreams, for example, or in the three judicial battles, the will of God announces itself. But even when all the figures and events are the consequences of a mindless causality devoid of purpose, we still recognize the presence of a transcendent design. That is because every epic presents its narrative as history, no matter if it is really a fiction. It demands of us that we regard its action, down to the rightness of the last detail, as a crucial part of the real past-of the living past, for the world that surrounds us as we listen derives from it. Even if some vent were in its inception completely accidental, it was nevertheless caused, and it produced consequences that led, in turn, to a ramifying pattern of causes; and so, what began as an accident becomes bound by causality and consequence to the ineradicable continuity of the past. For if we were to recreate the fabric of history, we would need this event to weave into our pattern. No matter how it happened, it has led somehow to the present state of things, to the facts we find in our world and the condition of our community, as so becomes, as we look back upon it, a part of the providential past: as things have turned out, it has served a purpose; therefore, it is necessary.
In case all this sounds too theoretical and abstract, let us consider two concrete examples. We can get some idea of how a thing is ennobled by our sense of its pastness if we consider how the death of someone we have loved or admired affects our feelings about his life. Sometimes death is a frightening specter, when it is almost in our ken: we get glimmerings of it, especially when we are ill. At such times we are frightened because we suddenly become aware that our body follows laws that pre-existed us and will go on after us, laws we never made or properly understood; all of a sudden our body no longer belongs to us, it is no longer the agent of our will, it responds to something that eludes our knowledge. Its governance is now taken over by another reality, another life, something that seems utterly alien to us but awes us by its immensity, its absoluteness, its intimacy. And so it sometimes happens that when someone we love has died, we identify his personal reality with that larger reality that ruled his body, and we find ourselves thinking of his death as an incredibly achievement, for we magnify his image with the greatness of that which engulfed him. Somehow, in dying, he has grown larger, become ancient and infinite; and our sense of that vast causality blots out our awareness of chance and circumstance -- his whole life takes on the coherence and inevitability of the laws that ordained his extinction. Everything that was gratuitous and accidental in his life becomes inevitable with his death. For no law decreed his existence: he did not have to live; but once he lived, he had to die. What had seemed to be the purposeless welter of his experience -- the meaningless color of his eyes, the incoherence of his enthusiasms, the unpredictability of his indifferences, the chance occurrence of his neighborhoods, the wild inconsequence that followed his choices -- now, in the light of his extinction, reveals an inspiring necessity. Now it can be seen that all his sleeping and waking moments were required exactly as they were to complete the form of his life. This is when we think of him in a few essential poses -- working with the tools of his trade, sleeping on his side with his under his head, listening to the news on the radio; and our every image of him is the illustration of an epithet -- he is the skilled, the childish, the gentle one, the unjudging, the long-sleeping, the incorruptible -- for we see him now transfigured with significance, a reality defined for all eternity. The things about him that irritated us when he was alive, if we remember them at all, we think of now as derived from his essential meaning. We regard him now as a perfect being, an aesthetic triumph, the fulfillment of an idea -- a father, a prophet, a fool, an irreplaceably ordinary man, but in any case unique, for his specific life and death were ordained.
What about the death of someone we neither love nor admire? Here we can find an example in American history, in an event whose centennial coincided with the bicentennial celebration of our origins. Again we can see how conditional necessity transfigures men and events. In 1876 General George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh U.S. Cavalry, despite numerous warnings and apparently acting in disobedience of others, into an ambush. He and his entire division were annihilated in the combined attack of the Sioux and Cheyenne, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Since then historians and American history buffs have reexamined the various possibilities of the situation. Should he have attacked the numerically superior Indians? How would it all have turned out had he ordered the region to be properly reconnoitered, had he not been so hungry for fame, had he not desired a promotion so keenly, had he awaited (as he was supposed to) the arrival of the division led by his superior, had he not -- like Roland -- longed for a glorious victory?
We have a right, and perhaps even a duty to ask such questions, because we know that this episode was completely unnecessary: the General could have acted otherwise. The massacre was gratuitous, the result of pure coincidence -- it could have not occurred. For this event took place only because a fool on the one side and two brilliant strategists of the other found themselves in the same place at the same time.
And it is now more than a hundred years old, it is part of our past. One may claim, with some pride, that the passage of time has not conferred upon this event the dignity of necessity. And yet time and the sense of the past have in fact done their work. This event is permanently recorded in our history as an act of madness, the result of a single man's grotesque conviction and ambitiousness and a whole nation's crusading spirit and racist zeal; and it has, enlarged in this fashion, taken on something of the quality of the poet's marveling portraits of Ganelon. Even in raw history Custer's madness has achieved a classic ingloriousness, even a kind of satanic dignity, as a point of reference for the nation that went on to Vietnam, as the American locus classicus of moral imbecility and self-destruction.
But suppose this event were to be related in an epic. Then there would be another kind of transformation: all these accidents would immediately become inevitabilities. For the condicio would be added: lacking necessity in themselves, the would become necessary by being viewed from the perspective of a transcendent vision -- providence and posterity know that these things will happen. We embarrassed and suspicious descendants would now become the audience, conscious both of the pastness of the event and of the epic form; and in that role we would, by our vision, transform the event into an enactment of necessity. Then the General's recklessness would become exemplary courage, an essential virtue of the American hero; the senseless slaughter would become a blessed martyrdom, the fulfillment of a sacred covenant; and above all, the defeat would become the first moment of an ordained rebirth. All these transformations would take place because our vision had enclosed the event in an historical and aesthetic frame that signifies that everything within is foreseen and therefore necessary. Looking back as inhabitants of the world that has emerged since then, we would see not an isolated catastrophe but the most critical moment in a providential structure. The question whether the General also acted as he did because he wanted a promotion would now be eradicated by the force of conditional necessity and replaced by motives better suited to the grand design….
But we know too much about Custer to make him an exemplary figure; there are too many witnesses to his nasty egotism and his lack of self-control. We cannot, with criminally deluding ourselves, give him the character of an epic hero, one that is worthy of receiving the commandments of necessity. Let us therefore give thanks that no one we know of has attempted anything of this sort, apart from a few foolish lyrics of the time and some "epic" movies since then. But simply from toying with this idea we can see that the hero's motives can never truly explain what takes place in the poem: they are mirrors, rather than movers, of epic action. For the hero would be diminished and his deeds trivialized if (like Custer) he had nothing but his own reasons and he were not appointed by history.
An epic necessity imposes coherence on the past, so it bestows dignity on men and events, for it removes them from the vanity of a personal will and identifies them with a divine intention. Necessity eradicates and creates, with its tremendous retrospective power, a new for every moment. The hero's motives are exactly right, even when he appears to a lesser man…to be most willful and undisciplined, for they realize a purpose too great for ordinary men to understand. He desires, with all his character and vitality, to bring about the crucial facts of history. Roland does what he does because he must do it, because the event has already taken place, in our view, and he has no choice. He is the agent of an accomplished action, and we are privileged to witness the true hero's graceful conformity to the rule of necessity.
Because we know the history of these events, we see Roland's acts as part of a pattern; and though we may later force ourselves to change our minds, we first see every pattern as the product of a deliberate will. For the point of view that sees, or projects, an immense design where there is only the welter of blind causality is a religious point of view; and so, even when we reject the substance of religion, we adopt its view of history when we are the audience of an epic poem. Roland's acts are part of an historical pattern, and we perceive them as emanating from the Will that produces history. Because of the ennobling effect of necessity, because his actions are always sanctioned by the demands of that transcendent pattern that we, in our present role as audience, cannot dissociate from the movement of a higher will, the hero can never be denounced as vain, or proud, or lacking in wisdom; nor, it follows, can his enemy ever be dismissed as simply a scoundrel. We must never judge Roland's motives by our common freedom and our common sense, because they are purely epic motives, his personal resolve to bring about what has already been enacted. Thus it is through necessity that the epic hero realizes his greatness and his humility; for he is the agent of providence.
[From Frederick Goldin, translator, The Song of Roland (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 14-18]
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